


Worse Things I Could Do

by evanelric



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Ending, Angst with a Happy Ending, Child Abuse, Gen, Happy Ending, Non-Canonical Violence, Not Really Character Death, Rocks Fall Everyone Dies, Serial Killers, Stalking, Suicide, The Author Regrets Nothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-19
Updated: 2012-11-19
Packaged: 2017-11-19 00:53:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/567203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evanelric/pseuds/evanelric
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Peter thinks Scott is the worst person he could have bitten, but overall things turned out pretty well for him, even counting the little death hiccough in the middle.</p><p>A series of ficlets exploring what could have happened if Peter had bitten assorted other people that first night instead of Scott.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worse Things I Could Do

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kayevelyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kayevelyn/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Discovery Channel](https://archiveofourown.org/works/491826) by [Kayevelyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kayevelyn/pseuds/Kayevelyn). 



> WARNINGS:
> 
> I AM KIND OF NOT JOKING ABOUT THE CHARACTER DEATH. Some of these scenarios do involve characters dying (Peter, for instance, dies in almost all of them, even if only temporarily) but they are all alternate canons. If you'd like a specific list of who dies in what scenario please see the endnotes.
> 
> I AM ALSO NOT JOKING ABOUT THE VIOLENCE. Some of the death is pretty violent, and possibly graphic. There are also details for that in the endnotes.
> 
> HOWEVER AND MOST IMPORTANTLY:
> 
>  
> 
> NOT ALL OF THESE FICLETS ARE VIOLENT/FULL OF DEATH/AWFUL. SOME OF THEM ARE PRETTY AWESOME.  
> 
> 
>   
> Actually fewer than half of them are possibly icky, and I've tried to arrange the order to cushion the blows, so it's not just a slew of everyone dying horribly and then everyone being awesome.
> 
> Also, protip: Suicide, Child Abuse, Stalking, and Serial Killers are all _canon elements of the show_ that I have chosen to tag because they might be triggery in fic form.
> 
> PSA: One of these sections (Stiles) is basically a vague summation of the major points of Kayevelyn's Discovery Channel, because I am her consulting muse/beta and that headcanon is the fruit of our mental loins and she said it was fine. There's nothing mentioned from that fic that you won't figure out from the summary/tags, but I'd highly recommend checking out her verse because it's amazing. n__n

*Scott*

Sometimes Peter thinks that Scott is the worst person he could have bitten, even if the decision wasn’t so much an active choice as merely the two of them being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the long term it wasn’t so bad, since he was able to orchestrate his own death and resurrection. Sacrificing the power of being Alpha for regaining his sanity is something that will always be worth it, and better that Derek has Laura’s power.

Peter doubts his ability to control Derek with Laura’s murder between them, even if Peter was still too out-of-control at that point to recognise her beyond the pulse of Alpha. He regrets that it was her in the woods that night, but recognises that without the boost he’d never have been able to survive long enough to recover. He’d have continued mindlessly slaughtering, and the arrival of the Argents would have put a stop to that soon enough. So perhaps Scott isn’t the worst he could have done.

*Stiles*

Stiles sprints through the woods, jumping over fallen trees and dodging standing ones, less concerned about stumbling over the (half of a!!!) body and more about _not getting caught at a crime scene by the Sheriff_. Eventually he stops running, fairly sure that a) he’s lost the search party, and b) he’s also lost, period. Turning his flashlight on nets him almost getting trampled by a herd of crazed deer, which coincidentally leads to him literally stumbling over the cold, naked torso of a very dead girl, and subsequently getting mauled by some sort of wild animal.

It doesn’t take him long to figure out that, as unlikely as it seems, the animal is probably a werewolf, which explains why his senses have seemingly gone haywire in exchange for the sort of focus he’d only ever dreamt about being able to achieve before. Once he’s solved that mystery it’s child’s play for him to peg Derek Hale as the prodigal lycanthropic son.

The part that catches him by surprise is that Derek isn’t the werewolf that’s been snacking on townspeople (although usually this ends up slightly more fatal than in Stiles’ case). No, his crazypants formerly comatose uncle is the Alpha. This leads them on a series of not-so-merry adventures with awkward relationships and hunters and all kinds of badtouch for Stiles and Derek, but it ends up alright.

Stiles can’t exactly say he’d expected any of it (because really, on a scale of one to ludicrous, ridiculous supernatural sex and murder are kind of phenomenally off the scale, even taking the whole _werewolf_ thing into consideration). But crazy Uncle Peter is dead and won’t creep on or murder anyone else, and Derek is going to make an awesome Alpha, especially with Stiles and the rest of their pack to help him out.

*Allison*

Allison is lost. She’d gone for a jog around the neighborhood, tired of being trapped in cars and houses and aisles of boxes, and their new house is in one of those labyrinthine subdivisions that all look exactly the same but that she can’t navigate to save her life. It turns out to be almost literal when something attacks her, and Allison stumbles into her house bloody and sobbing.

Her parents watch her carefully the next few days, and the wound heals fine (okay, so maybe not fine because it’s abnormally fast) but it seems like they’re waiting for something. They’re arguing over whether or not Allison will be allowed to go to a party this weekend when she yells something and her parents both flinch back as if they’re been struck. She’s not sure why, but they spend the evening conversing in fierce whispers that stop whenever she hits the creaky stair she hasn’t managed to remember yet. She goes to bed early in a huff, pretty sure her parents are going to be ridiculous and forbid her for attending for no reason.

She wakes up, for a given value of the term, to find her room filled with smoke. Her dad is sitting in a chair with his face in his hands, and his shoulders are shaking and Allison thinks he might be crying. Her mom is standing next to him with one hand on his quivering shoulder, trying to look stoic and failing because of the tears in her eyes. The room swims a bit, and she thinks she hears her father tell her they’re sorry, so sorry, and then everything goes black.

Gerard Argent descends on the town like an angel of vengeance. Peter Hale’s nurse is found with a bloody head wound and resulting concussion in the hallway outside his room, and a call to the local fire control emergency line leads the volunteer firefighters to a pyre containing dismembered limbs and torsos. The skulls of Peter and Derek Hale are mounted on iron poles in the center of the blaze, but they don’t figure that out until they check the dental records.

*Danny*

Danny is at the point in his life where he knows that 75% of Jackson’s plans that he goes along with and 100% of the ones he doesn’t will inevitably go to shit. Call it an occupational hazard. So when Jackson declares the bonfire in the woods is still a go despite the ongoing police investigation Danny is completely prepared to hightail it out of there at the drop of a hat. He just thinks it’s going to be because the party’s been crashed by cops, not some sort of monster.

Because it was Jackson’s idea Danny ends up coming out the worst off with a nice shiny new wound to clutch at on the frantic drive home, praying he doesn’t bleed on the seats. The things that happen over the following day are enough to freak him out, but not too badly when he has the entire internet at his fingertips. There’s only so much he can get at without pinging too many red flags, though, but what he finds is enough to send him on a ridiculous series of searches that he doesn’t even understand the connections between anymore, but somehow leads him to pound on the door of the Hale house after lacrosse practice.

Derek tries to fob Danny off, but Danny knows a lot of shit now, and judging from the way Derek’s impressive eyebrows are climbing he might even know more than Derek does. Danny’s pretty used to that, though, and it doesn’t take much to verbally strongarm Derek into helping him figure this shit out, because there is only so much reading can do. And if Derek is also incredibly easy on the eyes, well. It’s time he had a job with some perks.

The Alpha makes a fatal error when he sends Jackson a text to meet Danny at the school, because Jackson is _with Danny_ and it takes about 3 seconds for Danny to trace the text back to the long-term care ward. Once he has that info to add to all the knowledge he’s gleaned already it’s short work to figure out that Peter is the Alpha. Tripping the hospital’s silent alarm remotely means the cops show up to find Peter Hale missing, along with a nurse.

They find the nurse a few weeks later and a couple states over, stuffed in the trunk of her car, and Peter Hale’s body is a few hundred meters away, wedged in a crevasse and pumped full of apparently poisoned lead. Danny quickly realises that while Derek is _hot like burning_ that’s pretty much all he has going for him, and the awkward boners gradually stop. At least for Derek. But then Danny picks up Photography as an elective and he finds out that he is still capable of getting boners for plain, boring humans.

*Jackson*

Jackson dives behind a tree, hoping that whatever had jumped into the light of their campfire got tired of him and took off after someone else. He closes his eyes and tries to quiet his breathing, only to hear a growl and see glowing red eyes in a patch of darkness. He doesn’t even make it halfway around the tree before there’s a creature bearing him to the ground and pain ripping through his body.

The next few days are weird, and he has no idea what’s going on. He can’t really complain, though, because he’s even better at lacrosse than before, even if it does come with occasional blackouts. And that creepy 50s reject he took the restraining order out on.

And if the weirdly compelling old guy who claimed to be a talent scout turns out to be his Alpha (and what the fuck, werewolves, seriously?!), well. Jackson’s still getting what he wanted out of life. Who needs high school when Peter’s got bigger plans where Jackson is a key part instead of just a status symbol?

Jackson thinks he’s finally found someplace he can belong, and then he gets shot with some kind of crazy bullet. He ends up bleeding out in an alley in the warehouse district, one leg broken from where the impact of the shot sent him flying off the roof he had been running along. Peter kneels next to him, shaking his head sadly and chastising Jackson for not being more useful.

Jackson doesn’t live to see it, but Peter dies with half a dozen wolfsbane-tipped crossbow bolts in his gut and half his trachea caught on his nephew’s claws. He stays dead.

*Lydia*

Lydia is reconsidering her policy on never putting Prada on a tie-out. This is the third time she’s had to chase the stupid dog into the woods this month, and to top it off it’s freezing out. At least the moon is full so she can see. Leaves crackle off to her left, and she has just enough time to think _that’s definitely not Prada_ before she gets slammed to the ground.

She wakes up in the hospital and the doctors are calling it a medical miracle. For once she’s almost glad for her incredibly dysfunctional parents because with all the arguing there’s no way the consent forms for all the tests the doctors want to run will be signed. After her release it takes her a few days and a good bit of denial before she admits to herself that she’s probably been bitten by a werewolf, but Occam’s razor doesn’t leave room for anything else.

Luckily she’s practiced enough playing the vapid society girl that she can fool Peter into thinking she’s on board with his crazy plans, but Lydia has shit she wants to do and being Peter’s thrall isn’t going to help her accomplish that. She figures out the Argents’ role in all this (and _Argent_ , really? Could they be any more obvious?) and a serious chat with the paterfamila nets her an ally in taking Peter out.

When she and Mr. Argent confront Peter over Kate’s corpse she doesn’t wait for the wolfsbane buckshot to kill him before tearing his throat out, even if it will take ages to scrub the blood out from under her nails. She doesn’t even have to pretend wide-eyed disbelief at having taken Peter’s Alpha powers because Mr. Argent is busy kneeling in the pool of blood spreading from his sister’s body. Lydia is the one who finds Derek still strung up in the basement like a punching bag.

Mr. Argent can’t really say anything about any of the wolves when he realises what exactly his sister has done, but Lydia agrees to keep tabs on Derek, which isn’t hard now that she’s his Alpha. She even graciously promises Derek she won’t make up bullshit stories about him in exchange for him being her new arm candy, at least until she can escape to the East Coast for college. His contacts in New York might prove useful, and if her current popularity increases because she’s dating an incredibly attractive, mysterious older man? High school just got even easier, and her parents will be too busy blaming each other to actually do anything about it.

*Chris*

Chris should probably be helping unpack the last of the boxes, but after catching wind of the body in the woods he grabs his crossbow and a buddy and heads out to the woods. He hears Terry let out an ominous gurgle behind him and turns just in time to get a spray of blood to the face before whatever got Terry gets him, and he goes down hard. He fires blind and hits only air, but the mess is enough to bring the search party down on him. The concerned citizen act is unsurprisingly more effective when he’s bleeding all over the forest floor with what’s left of Terry congealing on the leaves next to him.

He dithers over what to do for a day, but when he snaps at Allison over wanting to go to a party and feels the wolf under his skin he knows he’s got two options, and neither of them include staying with his family. He gets into his SUV and drives for a few hours, ditching it and hot-wiring another car. He spends a couple weeks zig zagging across the country, but the waxing moon is a constant reminder that he can’t do this forever.

He stops eventually in some sleepy seaside town in Maine, where he picks up a scenic postcard (one with just a picture, rather than the typical _Wish You Were Here_ ) and addresses it to Victoria and Allison before posting it. At least this way they’ll have some closure. He watches the sun rise over the Atlantic and then depresses the aconite-filled syringe in his arm.

Kate arrives in Beacon Hills two days after Chris goes missing, and Gerard isn’t far behind. The bodies of Derek and Peter Hale are found in the woods the night following the next full moon, and the Argents have all left town. Chris’s postcard is delivered to an empty house.

*Isaac*

Isaac is digging a grave in anticipation of the body they’ve found in the woods when he gets attacked. Generally they don’t do it so many days in advance when the whole body hasn’t even made it to the coroner’s office, but he needed to get out of the house, and his dad hopefully can’t fault him for doing work. Hopefully. But then the backhoe is flipping on its side and Isaac is scrambling away when he gets tackled from behind.

When he wakes up his father hits him for using makeup like a girl to cover up the black eye he’d had the night before. He’d thought the blow had broken his nose, but by the time he’s mopped up the blood it’s only a little tender. He blames the blow to the head for how weird his senses are, and when he gets home and tells his dad he’s been permanently bumped to first line they order Chinese for the first time since Camden died. Something in Isaac curls up warm and fuzzy at that, and he thinks maybe things will be okay.

They get pretty busy at the cemetery, and with all the funerals Isaac isn’t really surprised when a stranger approaches him one day. When the stranger introduces himself, however, Isaac is torn between rolling over right there and being terrified of what his dad would think. Peter kind of comes off likes the stereotypical Catholic priest and Isaac is seriously concerned about his virtue for a while.

Then he finds out that Peter’s vice is less young boys and more murdering people violently. Isaac doesn’t even really mind helping Peter out when he finds out what they’ve done to him. If he could find the people who took Cam from him and his dad (and took his dad in the process) he’d do the same.

Isaac finds that Peter is pretty easy to please and sincere in his praise, and Isaac revels in it. Isaac isn’t the smartest, but he’s used to making himself invisible and he makes a good distraction. When Peter realises that he now has a quick and easy way to dispose of the bodies in the form of Isaac and his backhoe things get even easier. Kate Argent never has a chance once she gets an eyeful of Isaac’s bashful smile and adorable curly hair. The police never find her body.

*Erica*

Erica knows she shouldn’t be out alone, that she could collapse into an embarrassing, quivering mess on the sidewalk at any moment, but here she is. The sudden rush of the ground toward her face is familiar, but generally she’s much less aware of her surroundings when it happens, and the growling is definitely out of the ordinary. The pain and panic bring on a seizure, and her mother finds her passed out on the sidewalk in a puddle of blood and urine.

When she wakes up the road rash from thrashing on the pavement is gone and the bite is barely noticeable. A phone call to the doctor changes the dosage on her medication, and that’s enough to explain away why her perception of everything is off, but when two weeks have passed without a seizure Erica realises there might be something more at work. She sticks to her low profile, and her family is ecstatic they seem to have found something to keep the seizures at bay.

When Peter introduces himself and explains what happened she’s thrilled, because she knows that it’s not a fluke, that she’s really cured, and the niggling terror that she would be caught again by a seizure when she least expected it goes away. Peter trains her how to use her new abilities, to be extraordinarily ordinary. She learns about how werewolves are persecuted for being different, how the Hale family was nearly exterminated, and she learns to play the victim to lure in those who would kill Peter just for what he is.

It works well, until Kate Argent comes to town, because Erica’s big brown eyes aren’t the sort Kate is interested in, and if Peter isn’t a match for her shotgun then Erica doesn’t stand a chance either. She catches the second blast across one arm because she’s too slow to jump between Peter and the gun, and Kate laughs as she cries over Peter’s body. It’s just her luck that the wolfsbane the pellets were coated in triggers another seizure. Erica doesn’t wake up from this one.

*Boyd*

Boyd has his earphones in as he locks the maintenance door to the ice rink and doesn’t even hear his attacker, just feels himself being shoved forward and then cracking his head on a concrete parking curb. He wakes up in the morning to the klaxon of his cellphone’s alarm, and runs back in to use the rink’s showers and change into the spare clothes from his locker. He doesn’t even notice the blood in his rush to get to school on time.

He doesn’t realise what’s wrong until one of his cousins beats another one over the head with a toy truck and he literally snarls at the children. Luckily (or maybe unluckily) his grandmother is from the Bayou and knows almost as much about hoodoo lore as she does about the history of the Civil Rights movement. Considering Boyd has been reciting Malcolm X quotes at Sugar’s knee since before he could read that’s saying a lot.

Sugar says she wants to go back to Louisiana, so she packs a couple travelcases. When she declares she’s taking young Jules as her escort, because a lady shouldn’t travel unaccompanied at her age, no one in the family can make more than a token protest. No one argues with Sugar, although Boyd wishes he could lobby for a better nickname. He never meets Peter or Derek, but does make the acquaintance of a hoodoo priestess and the werewolf pack whose territory Sugar grew up on.

Boyd comes back to Beacon Hills the next school year with more knowledge than he’d ever wanted about the supernatural, the beginning hints of an accent, and a better acquaintance with the Beacon Hills vet than he’d ever expected to have. Peter is long dead, and both Derek and the Argents are long gone.

*Sheriff Stilinski*

It’s not that Sheriff Stilinski doesn’t expect to be attacked when investigating murders, but he doesn’t really anticipate being taken down by a wild animal while searching for a dead body. He considers going to the hospital, but there’s no wound when he gets time enough to check on it. The blood must be from whatever it was that attacked him ripping his bloodhound to shreds.

He gets more than he bargained for when he arrests Derek Hale for having half a dead girl buried in his side yard, but it certainly explains a lot about the string of murders that follows. Trying to keep the whole mess from Stiles is an exercise in futility, but they do pretty well until the insurance agent turned bus driver gets torn apart in a bus and the Sheriff tries to drown himself in a whiskey bottle to no avail. He’s not sure if he feels guiltier about the werewolf mess or that his sixteen-year-old kid is that familiar with his alcohol tolerance.

Between the three of them they figure out that Derek’s supposedly-comatose uncle is behind the whole mess, and it’s easier than the Sheriff would like to gather and/or plant enough evidence to get an arrest warrant for Peter. There’s a brief argument over how exactly to dispose of Peter; they have to kill him because prison won’t hold him, but the Sheriff isn’t about to let some kid have who knows what sort of influence over him. 

It’s not even the age thing, but he’s the Sheriff and has responsibilities and can’t afford any more conflicts of interest than he already has. Derek looks dubious about the Sheriff’s ability to handle the power so soon after being bitten, but the Sheriff points out that he’s basically already a human Alpha and Derek grudgingly concedes the point. Stiles is inappropriately giddy over the entire conversation and the Sheriff’s pretty sure there are stars in his eyes when Derek explains that this will definitely make the three of them pack.

Chris Argent proves helpful when Derek tells him that he’s only tangentially a weapons dealer. The man was quick to see reason when the Sheriff laid it all out for him. It would’ve been a shame if someone were to find out that Argent’s business was a front, for, say, drug trafficking. Who knows what those crazy dried herbs he has locked up in the bottom of the gun cabinets are for? He even helpfully provides the Sheriff with some complimentary ammunition from his private stock.

It’s not the Sheriff’s fault if Peter chooses to resist arrest and attack the Sheriff, and it’s easy to plant the improvised claw-gloves they’ve cooked up as his murder weapon. The story loses any chance of being questioned when the Sheriff brings in Kate Argent. She’s found guilty of not only kidnapping Derek Hale (and accusing him of being a werewolf), but of setting the fire that killed his family (because she thought they were all werewolves). Traumatic events can do funny things to people, and the Beacon Hills rumor mill is a force to be reckoned with.

*Matt*

Matt is wandering the woods, having taken advantage of the way the winter sunset filtered through the trees to test out the exposure settings on his new camera. He’s vaguely headed in the direction of where he knows the new girl has been moving in the last few days, but he’s not really in any hurry about it. Maybe if he’d moved faster he wouldn’t have been in the way of whatever it is that bowls him over, sharp bits first.

His new lens is a lost cause, because apparently his camera flew out of his hands directly into a tree, but he managed to get half a blurry frame full of something large and black, which doesn’t really do much to explain the wound at the bottom of his ribcage. At school it’s suddenly way easier to track the new girl ( _Allison_ , he learns), and luckily his old lens isn’t doing too shabby a job. When photoshop decides to be a douche and not cooperate with him he crushes his mouse accidentally, and suddenly a world of possibilities opens up.

There’s already a string of animal attacks, and Matt’s fairly certain no one’s going to pin a few extra deaths on a werewolf when they supposedly don’t even exist. It’s easy enough to Matt to get access to the places he knows his prey frequent, and almost easier to play a panicked bystander when the bodies are discovered.

He gets about half-way through the list before he’s cornered by none other than Allison’s dad, and his smile is even colder than his ice blue eyes. Matt thinks he’s going to get a _stay the fuck away from my daughter or I will_ end _you_ talk, so he’s not even expecting it when the knife slides between his ribs. His claws are out quickly enough to catch Mr. Argent’s sleeve as Matt falls to his knees, but he’s dead before he hits the ground.

The Argents leave town, thinking they’ve solved the problem, but Kate makes an appearance when someone else turns up dead on the next full moon. She finds Derek Hale squatting in the remains of his family home and shocks him ‘til he howls, and when the Alpha shows up she unloads a taser into Peter with one hand and a shotgun with the other. While he’s writhing on the floor she kicks over a few buckets of gasoline, seals the door with Mountain Ash and sets the place on fire again.

**Author's Note:**

> PSA: If you are at all intrigued by Stiles' section (or want were!stiles without having to read the rest of these ficlets) then I recommend you check out [Kayevelyn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kayevelyn/pseuds/Kayevelyn)'s fic [Discovery Channel](http://archiveofourown.org/works/491826/chapters/859366), which is nearing completion! I've basically summarised the main points of that fic, but I'm allowed because I am her consulting muse/beta and she said it was fine. There are also assorted pwp oneshots in that [verse](http://archiveofourown.org/series/24703), because were!stiles is best!stiles. Why yes, I am completely obnoxious in my pimping, but there will be no misunderstandings about source attribution, so.
> 
> WARNINGS:
> 
> The following people are killed as a result of being bitten:
> 
> Allison (Derek is also killed)  
> Jackson  
> Chris (commits suicide, Derek is also killed)  
> Erica  
> Matt (Derek is also killed)
> 
> If Derek dies it is violent, and in the case where Allison was bitten he and Peter have a kind of graphic death scene. Allison's scene is probably the worst, but Chris and Matt are also bad. Peter dies in every ficlet except Isaac's. Peter's death with Jackson is also kind of graphic.
> 
> THE OTHERS ARE ALL PRETTY AWESOME, THOUGH, AND SOME ARE INCREDIBLY BADASS.


End file.
